Thursday, 19 January 2012

Last week I found myself in The Cambridge Theatre in London, watching Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Matilda, by Roald Dahl. On one hand, this confession should make it obvious that here at Silkworms Ink, a cutting-edge literary e-press, we lack the nous to track down any cultural events more significant or trailblazing than a children’s musical. On the other hand, I don't think there were actually any children present, other than onstage; the audience was rammed full of childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old adults, all of whom presumably went home afterwards and told their childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old friends that it was a show grown-ups and kids could enjoy alike.

Anyway, I did enjoy it; it was a Tim Minchin musical, with the characters singing spoofy Tim Minchin songs in Tim Minchin’s favourite registers, making sly Tim Minchin polemic digs and being, in general, about as memorable as any of Tim Minchin's tunes. But it did remind me of the rather serious structural problem with Dahl’s novel; it’s two very different stories, tenuously connected, one of which sprouts out of the other and swallows it whole just as it's running out of steam. The second, eventually dominant story is a rousing, dark schoolyard tale, in which Carrie and Sheba Hart team up to defeat a villainous 1920s portrayal of a lesbian. The first story is the heartrending tragedy of a middle-class girl born into a working-class family, until eventually their inept criminality results in their fleeing to join their innumerable comrades in southern Spain, allowing her to return (hurrah!) to her own kind.

Facile, yes, but both of the interlinked stories in the novel articulate two distinct sides to Dahl’s personality and his writings; the revolt of Matilda and her classmates against Miss Trunchbull is a characteristically dark and funny, rather wonderfully skewed fairytale in which the righteous young heroine actually gets to defeat the monster after the rescuer/woodsman figure (Miss Honey’s father, heroically named ‘Magnus’) has already been tragically swallowed up by it. Matilda’s psychic powers come out of nowhere halfway through the novel and never seem to relate thematically to her intelligence or her love of books; rather, they rise from her impotent fury at adult injustice, her innate sense of fairness and strength evolving into the power required to overcome the villain. And Trunchbull is, indeed, a fine villain, perhaps Dahl’s best; he could create a grotesque character without blinking, but like so many great monsters, the hulking headmistress is as pitiable as she is terrifying, an insecure obsessive who, similar to his Twits and Witches, regards children as an undefined species of louse - memorably visualised, too, by Quentin Blake as a buttoned-up mass of brawn just barely keeping its balance on two pin-slender legs.

Matilda’s parents, however, have no such complexity; they’re bingo-playing, used-car-selling scumbag stereotypes who loathe their own daughter and her love of books mainly in order to give Dahl an excuse to bitch about television, a subject he thoroughly enjoys. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I seem to remember, contains a room devoted to television for no other reason than to horribly punish Mike Teavee, a small boy who, as you may have guessed, watches too much TV. Afterwards, the Oompa Loompas, serving as Greek chorus, caution parents to throw away their own sets. A brief reminder:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!

There’s a triple irony in there; one, in advocating that an escape from reality via literature is somehow intrinsically of higher merit than an escape from reality via television, two, that it was written around the time of Nigel Kneale’s first glorious genre pieces and Dahl’s own Twilight-Zone-esque anthology series ‘Way Out’ (now available online; it's really rather good), and three, that a spiel about the medium of film rotting the brain was written by the man who inflicted You Only Live Twice upon the brains of adults and children everywhere.

You can really tell this was written by someone passionate about creating intellectually challenging artforms.

I can’t bring myself to like this posturing, sneering Dahl any more than I like Boris Johnson for his godawful poetry collection The Perils Of The Pushy Parents, which steals openly from him;

Loving parents, learn from me.

If your children crave TV

Tell them, OK, what the hell

You can watch it for a spell ...

IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.

SON, I'M TALKING IN CAPITALS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU MUST COME TO ACCEPT THE INNATE SUPERIORITY OF ONE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OVER ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ANALYSING QUALITY ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IT MUST BE TRUE. I READ IT IN A BOOK.

There will always be an argument, which is to me at least part-convincing, that Dahl was a nasty man. It is, in fact, almost obtuse to point out that a highly-refined nastiness of spirit is what is so often utterly glorious and appealing to children and adults in his work, from the giants that reach into kids’ bedroom windows and gobble them up to the macabre turns of his Switch-Bitch stories.

What’s a little sad, though, is that when we’re young we read his books as a sensational dive into a land of horrors and marvellous weirdness; we don’t pay attention to the crude attempts at messages (I’m not sure Charlie And The Chocolate Factory scared me off watching television as much as my quaking fear of changing the channel and accidentally encountering Gene Wilder in the film version), we don’t really take in the uncomfortable fact that the Oompa Loompas were originally gurning, simpleton African pygmies, and we probably don’t find ourselves sitting through a children’s musical about an extraordinary genius being held back by a society that encourages mediocrity, thinking, ‘Hang on, this is the exact plot of The Fountainhead’. Maybe, despite the popular cliché, Roald Dahl’s books demand to be read and loved while you're young and before you start to panic about his politics.